Power Supply Roundup: 730W to 900W

Prices and Conclusion

All the power supplies seen today perform well under normal conditions, though Amacrox showed us why we actually test under stress conditions like the heat chamber. This is in fact the first broken power supply we've encountered since we started reviewing PSUs this year; frankly, we're surprised it took this long. The cause of the failure is most likely a broken Schottky diode, but our investigation is ongoing.

Though the power supplies have different max outputs, they can be regarded as one group serving the high-end market. These are power supplies for people running more than one graphics card and multi-core CPUs, probably with some moderate overclocking as well. After looking at the test results, we like the Cooler Master M850 and Antec TruePower Quattro 850 the most. They are reliable and have very stable DC outputs. They also generate the highest efficiency scores of the group with up to 87% at a medium load of 400W (with 230VAC). However, the ripple results could be better, and from in terms of noise the Cooler Master performs better than the Antec unit.

At the end of the day, it often comes down to price - perhaps the most important factor for many buyers. While a PSU may perform incredibly well, if the price is too high many will opt for a cheaper competitor. We'll look at prices in both $USD and EUR.

Some of the units are currently not available in the US, so we'll omit them from the $USD comparison. The Seasonic X900 is a very nice power supply, but we have to recommend looking at other previously tested models. You are far better off with the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 QUAD for a lower price and equal or better performance. Silverstone's Olympia is also too expensive right now, and given the performance in our tests we cannot give it a recommendation.

We mentioned Cooler Master and Antec already, as both generated good results. The price difference is quite large, and even though the Cooler Master performed slightly better we recommend the Antec TruePower Quattro since it's available for 140 EUR and $170 USD. At around 145 EUR or $200 USD the OCZ ModXStream places in the middle of the group, but despite reasonable performance we can't see much reason to buy an OCZ as opposed to the less expensive Antec TruePower Quattro.

Hiper targets the low to medium price regions. All of the units turned in a good performance today, and for the price we can certainly recommend them. Just pay attention to the available connectors, as we saw some important differences there.

Given the fact that the EUR to $USD exchange rate is quite high at the moment, all of the power supplies look like quite a bargain in the US. If you'd like to read more details of the individual power supplies, the remaining pages will provide pictures of the internals and additional commentary.